Agriculture today faces significant challenges that require new ways of thinking, such as smart digital technologies that enable innovative approaches. However, research gaps limit their potential to improve agriculture.

One of PhenoRob's aims is to translate research into practice. Pheno-Inspect GmbH is a 2020 start up, with a strong connection to PhenoRob, working on how to interpret image-data recorded in agricultural fields and from there on out build smart AI systems to do the same to and provide services in the agricultural industry.

IROS 2024 Best Agri-Robotics Paper Award for the PhenoRob paper "BonnBeetClouds3D: A Dataset Towards Point Cloud-Based Organ-Level Phenotyping of Sugar Beet Plants Under Real Field Conditions" presented by Elias Marks and finalist for the IROS 2024 Best Agri-Robotics Paper Award for the PhenoRob paper "Spatio-Temporal Consistent Mapping of Growing Plants for Agricultural Robots in the Wild" presented by Luca Lobefaro at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) in Abu Dhabi.

University of Bonn’s Institute for Geodesy and Geoinformation (IGG) joins global efforts in advancing Geodesy as a Partner of the United Nations Geodetic Centre of Excellence (UN-GGCE) in Bonn.

Jensen et al. (2024), including IGG scientists Helena Gerdener and Jürgen Kusche, evaluate trends in terrestrial water storage over 1950–2100 in CMIP6 climate models against the IGG GLWS2.0 global reanalysis from assimilating GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite observations into a hydrological model. The results were now published in the journal npj climate and atmopsheric sciences.

In 2023, the International Journal of Computer Vision created an “Outstanding Reviewer award” program in order to celebrate and highlight reviewers in our community that provided exceptional service to the journal with their reviews.

Some of the country’s leading centers for robotics have joined forces and set up a consortium to develop the new Robotics Institute Germany (RIG), which is set to become its first port of call for the robotics industry. The consortium’s coordinator Professor Angela Schoellig from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and RIG speaker Professor Tamim Asfour from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) unveiled the concept for AI-based robotics at the AI-Based Robotics conference in Berlin entitled. Launching on July 1, 2024, the project is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with €20 million over the next four years, and the University of Bonn is heavily involved.

Researchers at the University of Bonn have developed software that can simulate the growth of field crops. To do this, they fed thousands of photos from field experiments into a learning algorithm. This enabled the algorithm to learn how to visualize the future development of cultivated plants based on a single initial image. Using the images created during this process, parameters such as leaf area or yield can be estimated accurately. The results have been published in the journal Plant Methods.